QNAP TL-D400S Performance
Since this is a straight-through SFF-8088 chassis, we would expect there to be no performance loss with the attached drives.
That is exactly what we saw, which is somewhat a letdown, but also expected. There are some variances on the chart, but within a 5% margin for benchmarking, so it is not like a drive is running at SATA II 3Gbps instead of SATA III 6Gbps speeds.
We directly connected to the host system for testing, but if you used the included QNAP card, be mindful of the ASM1164 limitations.
QNAP TL-D400S Power Consumption
The system came with a fairly nice 65W Delta power supply. We have seen some fairly weak power supplies with other external enclosures, but this is a decent one. We just wish it had a locking connector to the back of the unit, or that it was internal.
With just the fan running, we generally saw idle power in the 3.4-5W range. When we had WD 18TB drives in this, we generally had power consumption under 40W. That is probably a good range for planning purposes. Since drives vary in their power consumption, perhaps estimate power at around 3.5W x number of drives x (drive power + 1W) or so.
Final Words
Overall, this is not the cheapest 4-bay SATA DAS by any means. We paid something like $299 for it. It comes with a nice power supply, a PCIe SATA adapter, and a SFF-8088 cable so it was ready to go out of the box. Really, that seems to be the market, the crowd that just wants something to work easily.
The unit was relatively quiet. The fan noise was very low, and easily overshadowed by the drive noise. Folks that say this unit is noisy are probably referring to the drives, not the fan.
A fun use of this system has been that we had a ZFS array on 4x 18TB drives, and we have been able to turn the unit off and drive/ sneakernet a lot of data importing the array to another system on the other end.
Overall, it worked out of the box at its rated speed and did not use too much extra power and noise, so it seems to be a decent unit, albeit nowhere near the cheapest on the market.
Where to Buy
We purchased our unit on Amazon. Here is the affiliate link for this model.
What are some recommended cheaper options?
Is this unit SATA-only just in terms of the internal wiring and connectors and the supplied card, but amenable to being plugged into an SAS HBA; or is the use of SFF-8088 just a convenience(it sure is nicer than eSATA) but the only thing the enclosure should be compatible with is the included card?
It is in an upcoming video working with a system and not using the supplied cable/ card so it is just SATA.
Does this require special drivers or software to operate in windows? Do drives get recognized in the OS just like any drive connected over SATA? I’m considering adding this to my pc, but I use backblaze for backups. Backblaze doesn’t backup NAS drives. Not sure if DAS drives work for Backblaze.
Just buy TR002 or TR004.
Hello!
Did y’all test and get this working reliably with an LSI HBA in, e.g., a TrueNAS Core or Scale system?
I tried to use this enclosure with an LSI 9207-4i4e in a TrueNAS Core box and … it did not go well. Apparently, the SATA controller inside the enclosure cannot keep up with TrueNAS Core, and Core ends up generating a ton of SCSI errors and randomly restarting the controller.
Hello i try to used it on Xigmanas (freebsd based), with the original card ASM1164 it doesnt work at all, so i replace with LSI 9300-8e but it was very tricky and i never enable to start my Xigmanas … just with many reboot under windows and after reboot on a test Freebsd it will start on a lab machine … :-( so a this moment continu to search what was the problem …
start failed with many mpr0 reinit controller event et start up never end … :-( I anybody have suggestion
I too would love to know if any / all of the TL-Dx00S units work with any linux or require the raid manager that QNAP provide for ubuntu. Having a raid manager bundled makes me suspicious that they’re not presented as JBOD disks. Looking around on the internet I have found nobody that has managed to make it work. There is one guy that tried BSD TrueNAS and failed which it appears he has also posted here. Nobody seems to be trying native linux but a lot of people want to know. Otherwise with the extreme lack of quieter tower based NAS cabinets based on good connection tech like SAS (USB/Thunderbolt not a good option here), I am forced to make my own I guess. It would be better if someone could confirm it.